Divine Dragon Parasmus felt something was out of place just now. A glance at his status quickly confirmed his suspicions.

Just a moment ago, he felt something take hold of his soul.

So quickly it was applied and so quickly was it masked that he’d almost thought he’d imagined it.

Almost.

He’d learned to trust his intuition over the journey that got him to this position.

The mark was quick to conceal and scramble itself, but he was still able to decipher parts of it. Not very much, but enough to glean a general understanding.

The curse had a two-part structure: a “tether” going somewhere imperceptible, connected to the “body” which settled within him.

The “body”, or mark, comprised the bulk of the curse he could contact and was inactive. In the time between its application and his notice, it had already permeated every facet of his being, entering both body and soul.

It was an impressive feat, given the size and nature of his existence, though an enemy was the last person he wished to be impressed by.

Over time, he was able to identify certain isolated parts that split off from the whole, parts that he hoped were too far to trigger should something go wrong. After an hour of prodding and through careful study of those few pieces, he was able to parse the curse’s overall structure.

His cautiousness and reluctance to do anything drastic stemmed from the fear that his actions would somehow alert the caster or trigger some prohibition. Either event would prove disastrous given his current situation.

So far, there was no indication that the caster realized he knew, as there was no movement after its application. If they knew and did nothing, that was all the more reason to be cautious. If possible, he would like to continue the current silence, no matter how unnerving it was.

To his knowledge, there was nothing in this world that could threaten him, nor was there anything that could assist in the casting of a curse of this caliber. However, the fact that such a thing had occurred could only mean one thing.

There was an otherworlder about, and one who was extremely difficult to solve.

Otherworlders.

Most of the time he’d just ignore their presence and avoid interacting with them, as their methods range from strange to mind-bending. Their abilities do not completely lie in sync with the world’s rules, so most are severely stunted upon arrival. These pitiful weaklings were the bulk of the infiltrators, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and required little attention.

However, a few can ignore this suppression. These generally are too much trouble to deal with. Their actions, while disruptive, cannot affect the world on a large enough scale. Leaving them to their devices, and letting them carve a small territory for themselves, is thus the most cost-effective measure. Provided they knew their limits, of course.

Then, the strongest among those few are able to warp the very laws of the world around them. He’d only ever experienced the impact of such a being once, which was more than enough times in a lifetime for his liking.

His current clues, fortunately, do not point the current situation in that direction. That he was not already insane from the onset of this mark gave him solace in the fact he was likely not dealing with the latter. The Calamity had left an indelible mark in his memory, leaving a lingering fear that did not abate over time.

This gnawing fear only increased with the growth of his power. Further understanding of the existence that brought incalculable damage to the world only made the gulf that existed between them more and more apparent. He rid himself of the memories long ago, but their absence was reason enough to elicit dread. After all, no one knows how much he treasured knowledge more than himself. That he would be willing to reduce insight to slow down his corruption proved the scale of that threat.

Knowledge, too, was a form of corruption when dealing with that kind of entity. Therefore, was his current knowledge of his assailant insufficient to trigger such corruption, or was he just not dealing with such a thing, as worst-case scenario as it may be?

Parasmus, ever the optimist, leaned more on the latter. For one, his current clarity was a good sign, and, second, he wanted to hold on hope for a little while longer yet.

After reassuring himself, and pushing back the terror that threatened to overwhelm him from the sudden and forceful resurfacing of sealed memories, Parasmus got back to work understanding the spell he was put under. Despite the complexity, the ‘tether’ was rather simple in principle.

However, therein lies its most unsettling aspect. Why would someone cast a spell that allowed the target to figure out where the caster was once they deciphered it? Were they just that confident in their strength?

Of course, he wasn’t able to tell exactly where it led, but with enough time and tinkering, he would be able to narrow it down. The tether itself was like a taut string, just waiting for the person on the other side to pull. Now, that shouldn’t be the extent of this segment’s function, but it should be its major focus.

The destination was obfuscated masterfully, but even still, he was able to tell it led to somewhere on the surface. Upon this discovery, it would be wrong to say that he wasn’t comforted by the idea that the opponent wasn’t some higher-dimensional being that just happened to take interest in him or his world.

This at least meant he had a fighting chance and wasn’t put up against some impossibly more powerful being. It wasn’t all good news, however, as it also indicated the opponent had carefully planned this curse out and had a staging ground on his world. It annoyed him that even with all the methods he had of gathering intelligence he was unable to catch this scheme during its planning and preparation phase.

Was it the fault of himself or his subordinates?

He humored the idea that this was all misdirection. That the curse was merely a red herring, thrown out to distract him from a different fire that was already burning. Parasmus took note of that idea and then suppressed the confidence that came along with it. After all, if that truly were the case he’d be more assured in solving the issue. An attack on his soul was the only thing he was wary of, with his current state, and generally, the more complex the plot, the weaker the mastermind.

He knew this from experience. He was no stranger to plotting against those far stronger than him. With this background, he understood that the larger the gulf between the target, the more obfuscation was necessary. It was with this insight that he engineered the fall of a Greater God early into the Calamity, followed by multiple other attempts at fishing in muddy waters. Nothing as major as the first. Just a few deaths here and there, with him picking up the scraps.

If the enemy had the strength to back themselves up, they’d have tried to take a bite out of the world already as that great Calamitous Beast did all those years ago. For a being of overwhelming might and animalistic hunger, what plans did it need? With just its approach the world was already a mess, and when it finally did arrive, the gods gathered together only to send themselves straight into its hungering maws. There was simply no resistance at all.

Following the Calamity, there was a time when he’d felt self-conscious, burdened by the guilt of sabotaging the Pantheon’s resistance against a foreign threat. The beast left after consuming all of them, though it didn’t bother to clean up after itself.

At the time, he made those petty moves with confidence in the gods’ victory. The sky would not fall with those deities holding it up, even if they were missing a few members due to his actions.

But the sky did fall.

Not because a few inconsequential pillars were missing.

No.

It fell because the weight that pressed down on it was far too heavy for any being or group, together or otherwise, to bear.

As such, those worries were laughably misguided. That ∎∎∎∎ was going to have its fill, whether the gods were able to band together and make a stand or not. If anything, his petty actions were able to save a few scraps of divinity for the world, lest it all be delivered straight to the door for that creature to eat.

Regardless, he saw the irony in the current situation.

He, like those gods all those years ago, could not run away from the threat, stuck confronting a terrifying unknown opponent. The only thing missing from the current picture now was one of his followers come along just to give him a “righteous backstab” during his weakest moment.

Which would probably be now, now that he thought of it. He was in a critical moment currently, at the threshold between god and world. Immobile as he was, it was the perfect time for someone he trusted to deal unto him a critical blow.

However, this wasn’t the time to be doubting his dependents. He needed cannon fodder to help bring this enemy into the light.

Their mobilization would have to wait until after he’d narrowed down the target first, however.

He couldn’t just send them after all the otherworlders, there were too many powerful ones. Too many smuggled in through the weakened world barrier, with those able to cross all possessing either strange abilities or overwhelming strength.

There were even some that approached his state prior to merging with the world, a True God, or Tier 7 by the System’s standards. They had no equals on the surface, as he did not allow his followers to reach that level of strength, but they were no match for him.

However, that was under the premise that they went under the ground to fight him. As a result, there was not much he could do about them squatting in his world. It was a stalemate that he did not wish to break, and they knew where he drew the line.

He’d repair the barrier and get enough control over the world eventually. Time was on his side. He had planned to just wait it out, but this curse disrupted his plans.

In hindsight, the problem now likely only grew to this point because of this attitude. He was patient before ascension, being a dragon, and is even more patient now. He saw time not in months, years, or even decades, but in millennia. This patience gave him unparalleled concentration but left him utterly blind to things that truly mattered.

He had been safe for far too long, losing the urgency he had developed during his rise to power.

However, it wasn’t like there was much for him to be proactive about.

He’s lost his body, a necessary consequence of power, but it made many matters more challenging. The only way to affect the world above was to spend the divine power accumulated over the years. This was a resource that was difficult to obtain even though he had no competition. In his situation, doing nothing was better than doing something, as his methods were severely limited.

Even now, there was little he could do without at least shortening the list of targets.

For example, something he considered at first while still gripped by emotion was to carry out a large-scale purge on the otherworlders. Most would have little capital to resist such a measure, however, all that would accomplish was show his hand.

Going after the weaker ones just to satisfy his desire to do something rather than just sit still would only tip off the one that truly mattered, to say nothing of the time and manpower required for such an endeavor.

That I even had such a desire in the first place spoke of how indulgent I’d become after ascending this far. I’m not invincible. Far from it. I need to go back to my roots. Think back to the days when I laid in wait for years hunting my quarry.

What he needed now was to gather his strength and give whoever schemed against him a decisive blow. Either disrupt their plans and buy him some time or kill them directly. As unlikely as it was, he hoped for the latter.

Oh, the sorrows of living in a damaged world. If I just had a little backup this would be made clear instantly. They’re literally right on the surface but I can’t see them.

Bah. But who am I to complain? I only got here because it was damaged to the point of brain death.

Venting his frustrations, Parasmus turned his attention back to studying. With dread, he moved on to the ‘body’ portion. He had futilely avoided messing with this, as it was bound to his soul. Touching that was the last thing he wanted, but he needed more information. He’d reached a dead-end on the ‘tether’ and needed more reference points.

This, being the bulk of the spell, took considerably longer, requiring him almost half the day to understand. He’d wanted to spend less time, as every second mattered, but he needed to confirm a suspicion he had.

The conclusion was not something he liked, however. The ‘mark’ clearly contained two law fragments that he was all too familiar with, and their inclusion, which he wished was a result of misidentification earlier, was the trigger for those unbidden memories.

They are infinitely close to the tendrils with which the foreign Bringer of Calamity used to feed, borrowing and twisting the world’s laws of ‘corruption’ and ‘sublimation’ into nightmarish paths to power that were better left sealed.

With the descent of that entity, whose writhing body was suffused with these laws, what was once a minor backdrop in this world, became a major player. It plagued the land for centuries, luring countless power-hungry mortals to abandon their reason. That was in the past, though. Now, thanks to his efforts, one couldn’t tell the existence of such a blight from looking at the surface.

It was only after the monster left that Parasmus realized these laws he had so much trouble dealing with were akin to an animal’s digestive enzymes, only, these enzymes specialized in painting the world in its color to facilitate consumption. This discovery made the fact that they were left over easy enough to understand.

Why would something so powerful be left behind like waste? It was because they were waste.

However, power was, at the end of the day, a relative thing. These dregs, waste not worthy of recovery in the eyes of that indescribable being, were still leagues ahead of native laws pertaining to “corruption” and the like. Like prions they bent the native laws to their shape, replacing them entirely. If Parasmus had chosen to incorporate them into his godhead he would have reached a height unfathomable compared to him now.

It was fortunate, then, that he had a feeling early on that dependence on such a power was a massive pit, and that he was clear-headed enough to guess the consequences of using it any more than he had to. As a result, he’d excised the parts of himself that were hopelessly corrupted, and ascended with the divinities he pieced together, cutting off the very thing that allowed him to reach such a position.

Following this was a tale spread across the world, his very first myth, and possibly the greatest good he’d done for the world’s recovery. These tales spoke of him ending the Calamity, sealing the great evils, and bringing balance to the world once more.

He was rightly crowned as the savior, bringing legitimacy to his reign even to this day. Had he not been so decisive the world would be in a much worse shape now. It would even be a miracle for anything to even be alive at this point. While doing this had done wonders for his sanity, and he never once regretted making such a decision, it stripped him of the deep connection he had with those powers.

Now, with that delicate balance he fostered being threatened, coupled with the emergence of an enemy that can control such a force, it would be strange to not be worried. Rather than a mark of his great triumph, as the stories would tell, in his current situation, those sealed fragments are essentially buried land mines, ready to blow up in his face at any moment. His face, of course, was the world itself.

Are they stabbing me with a borrowed knife?

Up to now, he hasn’t felt any of the seals loosen or the contents taken away. While he wasn’t arrogant enough to stare at each of them directly to ensure that fact, as he still very much liked his sanity, his myriad failsafes indicated that everything was operating as usual.

Despite this assurance, the similarities were uncanny and with the aid of those sealed corruption sources as a focus, the mark made sense.

After all, with continuous study, the curse seemed more and more like some sort of sacrificial ritual, one set out to transmute his soul into a more palatable, or in this case, more useful state for the recipient.

In alchemical terms, it would be likening it to the creation of a philosopher’s stone, akin to what he was trying to do with the world's heart. That his specialties lay in transmutation and the soul, a necessary outcome after his attempts at grasping the ineffable, paralleled the manner the enemy attacked him, had not gone unnoticed.

If it weren’t because they moved the seals, then perhaps they drew inspiration from that ∎∎∎∎ being as well but failed to rid themselves of the corruption as he did. This theory would prove disastrous if true, as he can’t afford to take in much more of that taint.

This also made him consider the possibility of a native being behind all this. He was justifiably more wary of outsiders, but he didn’t have complete control over the people of this world yet. Those heretics were strangely quiet for the past few centuries. He had chalked it up to the efforts of his faithful and those otherworlders, but could it be that they managed to break a seal without his notice and did something with its contents?

That would be difficult to confirm, as he abhorred the idea of checking them all one by one himself. Sending fodder wouldn't do, either, as they wouldn’t make it deep enough to see if it were genuinely missing. Even the leftover residue would kill them.

The [Blessed], his greatest creation, might be able to, but they weren’t enough to check them all. Furthermore, he wanted to save them for the inevitable confrontation to come.

While sending a few might be better than getting blindsided, the costs were too much for that kind of information. He’d rather just prepare for that outcome. The findings such a mission would provide could also be gleaned from more research on the spell in front of him.

Whatever this spell intended, these findings were hardly heartening, to say the least.

If their methods were anything close to his, he was in for a tough time. Parasmus knew what his victims experienced and he would be damned if he were to suffer such a fate as well.

He mused the irony before, but it became increasingly clear that this time, he was the fish on the chopping block and was in no position to take advantage of the situation. Nonetheless, he was all but ready to make his next move.

Now, the only event that would be insurmountable would be if ∎∎∎∎∎, as the system dubbed it, was not a singular existence, and another of its kin invaded.

However, he could only gamble that this was not the case. He hadn’t felt the telltale warping of the world’s natural laws that come with their presence, so he felt that this gamble was likely to go in his favor. He only had one example to go off of, but he felt that he would know if something that strong came through.

Furthermore, it was impossible for ∎∎∎∎∎ to invade once again. Not only because this did not mirror the haphazard way it did so during the Calamity, but because the world was sure of it. He didn’t know why himself but gathered that from the pieces of the world will after the thing’s feast. It seemed to know many things before being severely damaged.

His inheritance over the world was taken forcefully and the source was severely damaged, making much of the information incomplete. It was still enough to get some “common sense” that changed his perspective completely, however.

Hell, he was quite surprised to find out that the Overgod was actually an incarnation of the world's will. It was rather competent, too, before being kicked in the head.

Based on that little bit he figured out, time was of the essence. He didn’t have more time to sit around studying the thing. The next breakthrough would take too long, and the gains did not outweigh the losses. He’d narrowed it down to the Northern Everfrost. There weren’t many people there, to begin with, and even fewer otherworlders.

There was only one person that he had a feeling was the target. There was a foreign wizard who built a massive entrenchment up there, though he didn’t seem strong enough to do something like this, one could never guess what a mage could do with enough preparation.

From the scouts and probing attacks he’d sent before, he judged their level to be well past a thousand. However, they were very sneaky and had a way of obfuscating their level, making themself appear much weaker than they actually were.

If it were truly him, then even his highest overestimation was under their true capabilities. To be able to put such an insidious mark on him after he’d assimilated half the world would be impossible for someone so much weaker than him.

That Turtle of the North hadn’t shown any indication of being a threat so far, but that was the issue. If he truly was as strong as him, no one at their level just decides to go into a world as tumultuous as this one without a plan. Without the natural abundance of a world before the Calamity, there was no reason for anyone with the ability to travel around to stay here.

Even he would have left had he not had the opportunity to assimilate the world. Why else would he become a god in such a place? Parasmus was not one for charity.

It was settled then. He’d ascend an avatar and rally everyone that could be mobilized and see just how tough this turtle’s shell truly was, all the while he hoped that this deduction was correct. While it may be a little hasty, he was running out of time.

He felt a change in the mark about an hour ago, an unsettling shift that weighed on him. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he was sure that it wasn’t going to be good for him. Now was not the time for more study.

Furthermore, as he turned his consciousness upwards in preparation to contact his followers he made another startling discovery. He’d always been focused on himself, especially since he couldn’t always monitor his whole self given his size. However, this trait blinded him to the true danger.

It was arrogant of him to assume the mark was solely targeting him.

No. It had its tendrils in everyone.

The people, the plants, the animals. Even the otherworlders he was able to spy upon were no different.

All of creation borne lesser or greater, from the smallest insect to the mightiest beast were beset by this spell, and they were none the wiser. The scale of this threat had gone up magnitudes in his mind, pushing him to make a move immediately.